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Note: WSL from Windows 10, May 2019 Update (version 1903) is required for this feature. You can also run the Remote-WSL: New Window using Distro… command from the Remote – WSL command dropdown displayed when you click on the remote development Status bar item on the far left. Once you pick a distro, a new instance of VS Code will open connected to the appropriate distro. This will bring up a quick pick that will let you choose between the different distros you have installed. If you are connected to one distro and want to open a new VS Code window, bring up the Command Palette (F1), search for “distro” and choose the command Remote-WSL: New Window using Distro…. You can install another distro such as Debian from the store (just search for “Debian”), such that you end up with two different distros installed. If you followed the tutorial in the earlier blog post, you installed the Ubuntu “LTS” (Long Term Stable) release, which is currently version 18.04. You can install multiple Linux distros on Windows. Choose the Remote – WSL extension as seen below (it should be at the top of the list) and press Install. If you don’t have the extension already installed, open the Extensions view in VS Code (Ctrl+Shift+X) and search for “wsl”. The features described below are provided by the VS Code Remote – WSL extension.
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In this post, we’ll go into more detail and provide tips and tricks to further enhance Linux development on Windows. In an earlier blog post, An In Depth Tutorial on Linux development on Windows with WSL and Visual Studio Code, we showed you how to set up Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Visual Studio Code for Linux development.
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